Being only able to give Tamara Drewe just two cheers makes me feel oddly churlish. It has a great cast and the ensemble does well and the setting is great (though a little worse weather, even a few duller days, would have made the rural setting rather more truthful - friends we really don't get that much sunshine in Old Blighty, not even in Hardy's Dorset). So why my reservations?Well, I think it has to do with the fact that the film is based 'on a graphic novel' that was, I think, in turn based on a newspaper strip cartoon. And there's the rub: you can get away with a great deal more in a cartoon than you can in straight film (which, after all is what Tamara Drewe is). In the graphic novel I'm sure the story made perfect sense in that it doesn't really have to make a great deal of sense. But on film? Hmm.The set-up is promising enough, but as the film goes on it doesn't really hang together all that well. You can't have it both ways: either the characters, especially Tamare Drewe herself, behave naturalisticaly or they don't. But they can't do both. I can accept Tamara falling for the crass drummer, but wholly inexplicable is why she later goes on to bed the narcissistic middle-age philandering crime novelist. And that man's wife might be gullible, but surely to goodness outside of a graphic novel no one is that gullible. Another character who is more at home in the graphic novel is the free- loving barmaid at the local pub. And exactly what role she plays in the whole set-up is none to clear.Having said that, Tamara Drewe is a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes, but it might have been even more pleasant had the producers decided to make of it a different animal entirely. Merely providing a film version of the graphic novel doesn't really cut it. Shame.

Good English comedy-drama. Light, whimsical, subtle and understated - i.e. a typical good English comedy-drama! Decent, mostly character-driven plot, though threatens to unravel near the end.Solid performance by the stunningly beautiful Gemma Arterton in the lead role. Well supported by Luke Evans, Roger Allam, Dominic Cooper and Tamsin Greig. Despite all these good performances, the show is stolen by 18-year old Jessica Barden. Her over-the-top, kooky, intense performance as the seemingly-deranged schoolgirl Jody is screamingly funny, and keeps the movie moving.

Throughly enjoyed this film. The characters married beautifully to such a deliciously scribed plot, and were oh so believable... even the cringe factor worked - when gorgeous Tamara stoops well short (way shorter than her short shorts-geez if only i could pull that look off...) and sleeps with the guy who reminds me of Christopher Hitchens (... nice brain - ah, Hitchens, that is, but shame about the rest...)... and the schoolgirls - oh..the two teenage girls totally carried this movie they were AWESOME !! Anybody who did not enjoy this movie hasn't been around. The various characters - the lecherous writer, the 'put upon' housewife, the rock star and the hotel licensee were fantastically observed characters. I loved it!

Cartoonist Posy Simmons has been chronicling the secret fears and loathings of the middle classes for over 30 years. But what makes her cartoons funny is the way a single picture, an exaggerated drawing of an eye or an uncomfortable smirk, can speak a thousand words. Make a film of a cartoon - and make fully explicit the implied contents of Posy's seductive images - and the danger is that what you get is too shallow to work as a serious film, without the delights of Posy's drawings (like a moving version of a dreadful photo-comic). So it is with Stephen Frears' version of 'Tamara Drewe', which occurs in a picture-perfect version of the English countryside, has a soundtrack that explicitly declares the film to be a caper, and a cast of characters, many beautiful, all one-dimensional, and none of whom you care for. Roger Allam, playing a role not wholly dissimilar role to his part in 'The Thick of It', is good fun, but it feels overall more like a sketched outline than something fully worked out: more storyboard than cartoon.